Microsoft has drastically cut its internal budget for the AI assistant Claude from Anthropic within a year. According to a report by the trade service The Information, the monthly spending limit per employee in the affected division is falling from $100,000 to around $10,000.
The number of users of the coding tool Claude Code at partner Meta is also dropping from around 60,000 to about 30,000.
Microsoft directs teams to its own and cheaper tools
Microsoft's annual forecast for internal Claude expenses stood at at least one billion dollars and has now been cut by more than a third. The company is increasingly directing developer teams and other employees to its own tool GitHub Copilot, which primarily runs on models from OpenAI; individual employees can still choose Claude if a task requires it.
Microsoft did not officially confirm the exact figures to The Information.
This move is part of a series of internal cost-cutting measures that, according to earlier reports, were primarily triggered by the rising token consumption of agentic coding tools: as early as July 2026, CoreAI chief Jay Parikh introduced token budgets for each business unit and made GPT-5.6 the internal default model.
Shortly before, Microsoft had begun to redirect requests from Excel and Outlook to its own MAI models to cut licensing costs for OpenAI and Anthropic.
The current step changes nothing about the underlying contracts: Microsoft remains obligated to pay OpenAI licensing fees at least until 2032, regardless of which model individual teams use day to day.
Meta halves usage, customer business stays unaffected
Meta is also scaling back its internal use of Claude Code. Part of the drop from around 60,000 to about 30,000 users is attributed to the company's layoffs this year, while another part stems from the parallel push behind its own coding agent Muse Code, which Meta launched in August as a cheaper alternative.
In a single 28-day stretch alone, Meta's Claude Code usage reportedly cost more than $105 million – a figure that is not independently verified but illustrates the urgency of the internal cost control.
According to the report, the cuts at both companies affect only their own workforce, not the business with paying customers: companies that access Claude models through Microsoft's cloud platform Azure or Amazon's Bedrock service are reportedly using more capacity than a year ago.
The billion-dollar strategic ties also remain unchanged: Microsoft pledged in November 2025 to invest up to five billion dollars in Anthropic, while Anthropic in turn committed to buying $30 billion worth of Azure computing capacity.
What matters now is whether the belt-tightening at Anthropic's two largest distribution partners slows its growth ahead of the company's IPO expected in 2027, even as paying customer business keeps growing according to the reports.
It remains open how much the internal retreat of two key customers will strain Anthropic's relationship with its biggest technology partners over the long run.
